


Dustland fairytale

by Elisexyz



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Enchanted Forest, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Families of Choice, Unplanned Pregnancy, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 15:25:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16328603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisexyz/pseuds/Elisexyz
Summary: Boy meets girl, it’s a tale as old as time....Well, they probably shouldn’t meet while robbing the same shop, but, you know. Details.





	Dustland fairytale

**Author's Note:**

> So. I wrote this on a morning when I was supposed to study. I tried to just write down some notes and go back to my responsibilities, but it just wouldn't leave me alone, so I wrote 5k words in one go LOL. And then I decided to share them because why not.  
>  Sidenote: this doesn't follow everything we saw about how things worked in the Enchanted Forest, I changed some things if it suited the story I wanted to tell. For example, no girls/women are drafted for the Ogre War here.

There’s a baker who always drinks a little too much and ends up sleeping on the job. It’s not like the shop has _that_ many costumers anyway, and if someone comes in they’ll make sure to wake him up, won’t they?

Emma doesn’t always get her food from him, that would create trouble that she doesn’t need, but every now and then…

She comes in in the late afternoon, when she knows that it’s very rare for costumers to come by, her ears open to catch any sign of the owner waking up or of someone coming in. Which is why it’s surprising that she doesn’t hear him until he’s standing right next to her and saying, very casually: “Hey.”

She barely resists the urge to let out a scream that would most _certainly_ wake up the baker, and her next impulse is covering the guy with insults, especially because he’s grinning at her like he’s very pleased with himself. She swallows that urge too, quickly trying to decide if she should make a run for it with what little bread she managed to gather or if she should push out some tears and recite her sob story in the hopes that he’ll let her go, but he speaks first.

“Don’t mind me,” he whispers, grabbing a piece of bread from right under her nose. “I’m here for the same reason you are.”

That said, he just starts putting food in a bag, as if she weren’t even there.

“I was here first,” she protests, but she goes back to taking what she wants.

The guy – Neal, she decides, he looks like a Neal – scoffs. “We can split the stuff _after_ , if you like.”

“Fine,” she agrees. He looks about her age and he’s not particularly tall, there’s a chance that she can struck him in the face and run away with everything if he tries anything funny.

They are very quick to fill their bags – well, they don’t quite _fill_ them, it’s not like they want the poor dumb baker to go out of business –, then they sprint for the door, Neal briefly checking if anyone is outside before gesturing to her to follow.

After they’ve found a quiet corner at a reasonable distance from the bakery, he actually stops and turns towards her, opening his bag to show her what he took.

“Something you need from here?” he offers, casually.

Emma wasn’t honestly expecting him to be really willing to share. Her claim that she had dibs on the food because she was there first was pretty ridiculous to begin with.

“You have more than me,” she says, regardless, because god knows how long she’ll have to make this one trip last. “We should even.”

He grins. “Well, I have two mouths to feed,” he counters. “What about you, how many?”

Her jaw clenches, and she finds herself feeling much, _much_ less benevolent towards him after he hit that sore spot. “Just me,” she says, drily.

He seems surprised, then saddened, and Emma wants to hit him in the face, because she knows that being an orphan is pitiful, but that doesn’t mean that she’s willing to stand _seeing_ the pity on people’s faces.

“Are you homeless?” he asks, bluntly.

Emma raises her eyebrows. “Is it relevant?” she asks, defensively. She’d hardly call a nest in the woods a _home_.

Neal shrugs. “Depends. Me and my papa don’t have much, but it’s probably going to rain soon, and we do have a house and a fire. You’re welcome to come with me, if you like.”

In spite of her young age, Emma is anything but naïve – you really can’t afford to be, when you are a young girl fending for herself in the streets –, and if there’s one thing that she knows for certain is that an offer like that doesn’t come without strings.

“I’m not going with you,” she replies. “You might be a pervert.”

He considers her for a moment, then he shrugs. “Fair enough.” She expects him to either let it go, or jump her, or run away with the food he got, instead he takes out a small knife and hands it to her, handle first. “You can use it to stab me in the face if I try anything funny,” he explains. “And my father is a limp, you can outrun him easy.”

She keeps eyeing him sceptically, without taking the knife. “What do you get out of this?”

He snorts. “A clean conscience? If you get a cold and die it’s my fault, and I’ll spend my life wondering,” he offers, grinning at her and gesturing for her to take the knife.

Yeah, well, she’s good at self-defence anyway, she _could_ stab him if he tried anything. And a roof and a fire are a very tempting offer.

“And how do you know I won’t stab you regardless of what you do?” she asks.

He shrugs. “Leap of faith.”

She’s starting to think that this guy is way too dumb to pose any kind of threat.

“Emma,” she offers, finally taking the knife.

“Good name,” he comments, which earns him an eye-roll. “Baelfire.”

Yeah, no. “Seriously?” she asks, irrationally disappointed. “You look _much_ more like a Neal.”

He laughs at that. “You can call me that if you like. Come on, let’s go before it starts raining.”

She has to wonder how comes that he is still standing, because not only he just handed a knife to a perfect stranger, but he has no problem turning his back on her after that. He needs a couple of life lessons.

 

 

Neal lives not far from the village, in one of those houses scattered where the woods are not too thick. Calling it a house may be generous, considering that the poor thing seems about to fall down any second, but it has walls and a roof, and it’s much better than Emma has had in a long time, so far from her to look at a gifted horse in the mouth.

“Papa!” Neal calls, opening the door and leading the way. “We have a guest.”

They are greeted by a frail man, who stands up from his chair as soon as they come in and starts approaching them with a confused frown on his face – Neal wasn’t joking when he said he limped; that looks _painful_.

“Oh,” the man says, glancing at her. “Who is she?”

“Emma,” Neal replies. “She needs some shelter, it’s about to rain. We met at the bakery.”

The look on the man’s face makes Emma suspect that he probably isn’t too fond of his son’s method to gather food, but it’s soon substituted by a warm smile in her direction.

“Of course,” he says. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need to. My name is Rumpelstiltskin.”

The _How the hell do I pronounce that?_ flashing through her mind must show on her face, because his smile widens.

“Rumple is fine,” he adds.

Emma finds herself smiling back, nodding briefly. “Thank you. It’s nice here.” Totally beats camping in the woods.

Neal proceeds to take off his cloak and take hers, then he tells her where she can stash her bread, because of course they are not eating _that_ for dinner, while Rumple starts mumbling something about _probably_ having something to make a decent soup in the kitchen.

She can’t stop smiling.

 

 

She ends up staying.

The first night, Neal takes the floor and leaves her his bed. There’s a storm raging outside, and although everything creaks and they have to light a lamp to deal with a leak in the middle of the night, Emma is tucked under a blanket and she’s not alone in the dark.

The second day, it’s still raining and, well, far from either of her hosts to send her out with that weather. She offers to pay back by having lunch with her bread, and they end up compromising that she’ll eat hers and they’ll eat theirs, because there’s no need to make her waste her supplies.

The second night, she tries to argue that she should at the very least take the floor, and Neal just grins and says that _maybe_ he’ll let her have it on the third night.

On the fifth day, the excuse of the weather is long gone and Neal comes back to Emma helping his father with the spinning – or rather, watching and trying to understand how the hell it’s done.

“I found a bed!” he announces, grinning from ear to ear, and no one has anything to object.

(Stashing another bed in the already small house is a bit of a nuisance, but they push Neal’s in the corner and hers barely a inch away from his, and it works. Nobody says anything about the far from comfortable arrangement.)

 

 

When Emma was little, she was found by the side of the road by a couple who couldn’t seem to have children. They took her in, calling her a miracle, and raised her as their own. Except they didn’t have much, and when, six years later, they had a child of their own, what could they do but choose to feed their flesh and blood?

At least, unlike her real parents, they had the decency to leave her on the doorstep of an orphanage.

She could hardly get used to _that_ , after knowing the warmth of a real home – and losing it, because she wasn’t good enough.

She ran away from that mess of kids either crying themselves to sleep or bullying other kids into submission to feel less weak or both when she was thirteen. They never found her, and at seventeen she’s used to the road. The loneliness is a little harder to swallow, no matter how long it’s been.

When Rumple decides to take her in, she wants to bash herself in the head because of how _easy_ it is for her to fall for it again: she’s been chosen and then rejected before, she shouldn’t be opening herself up to the possibility again.

Yet, Rumple already has Baelfire, and he wants her anyway. He’s making her a new cloak, even if he shouldn’t do it for free with how little money they get from his work, but he insists that there’s no way he’s letting her walk around during winter with _that_ thing – meaning her old cloak, full of holes and a little too thin to properly warm her.

Emma likes him.

She knows how to catch small animals, so she teaches Neal some tricks. In turn, he shows her how to chop wood without killing herself and how to properly pick a lock – “Hey, you never know, it could be useful!”

She spends lazy afternoons teaching the both of them how to read, because they never had an orphanage to teach them how to and it’s not exactly a priority when you hardly get by, she spends nights – and mornings, or afternoons, whenever – curled up in Neal’s arms, because their beds are so close anyway and the cold is always a good excuse, isn’t it?

He’s her first kiss and her first love, and for a minute there she turns into a proper young girl, daydreaming of getting married and having a family, because somehow she’s stopped wondering when the other shoe will drop and her new home will be shattered.

(Maybe that’s exactly why the other shoe _does_ drop.)

 

 

At first, Emma writes off talks of a third Ogre War as meaningless chatter in the village: people like to talk, and there often isn’t much _worth_ talking about in small villages like theirs, so exaggerating rumours is a good way to go.

Except merchants passing by start fuelling the voices, a man arrives looking like death warmed over and announcing that the world is ending, and then start coming families, traveling with what’s left of their belongings and looking for shelter in the parts of the land that are still unaffected – for now, Emma can’t help thinking.

Rumple starts panicking.

Emma doesn’t know much about how he got injured, just that it was during the Second Ogre War. She never asked, she doesn’t really want to know.

What she does know is that Baelfire is almost nineteen now. He’s a strong young man with no health problems and no money to make sure that someone will look the other way and ignore his lack of involvement in the war.

There’s chatter that soon even small villages still safe from the raging war will be called to send their men there, and Emma is just as terrified as Rumple is.

Neal, of course, is calm and rational and ‘If the law says I have to fight, I will, Papa’. Fuck him.

When the order finally comes, Rumple wants to bolt. He wants them all to gather their things and flee, as far away as possible, where they won’t take away his boy. Emma would love for that to be a possibility, honestly, but they have no carriage, no horses, Rumple can only stay on his feet for so long and they’d have to _walk_ all the way to who knows where— they’d never make it.

Emma sits aside, her hands trembling and her eyes stinging, as Bealfire hugs his father and assures him that everything will be fine, that they’ve defeated the ogres before, so who knows, it may be over before they know it.

The second war ended when Emma was a few months old, but she’s seen the families destroyed by it, and she’s crushed by the chance that, no matter how long this stupid fight lasts, hers will be next.

(She holds extra tight onto him, that night, and she’s pretty sure that no one in the house managed to get any sleep.)

 

 

The day Neal leaves, he’s grinning too widely to fool her, and she’s barely keeping the tears at bay.

Rumple hugs him first, attempting a lifeless smile as well and failing miserably at it, eyes full of tears as he reaches for his son’s cheek and makes him promise to be careful – what a stupid promise, when they are sending him to die in a stupid war.

They part with another hug, and Rumple is holding so tight onto him that it probably hurts. Balefire hides his face in his father’s shoulder, and Emma is thorn between the urge to bolt, because she isn’t sure that she can survive her goodbye, and the need to get every last second that she can with him.

“Oh, come on, what’s with the face?” Neal tries, with a tentative grin that doesn’t reach his eyes and a flip at her arm. “I’ll see both of you again.”

“You don’t _know_ that,” she hisses, angrily, and she knows that she’s not supposed to, that she should try to fill his spirit with _hope_ and _positivity_ , but she’s never been good at that crap, and when she was _starting_ to be hopeful again— well, they decided to send the reason why off to war.

“I do know that. It’s a promise, this isn’t over,” he insists, because he’s a _liar_ , and her face twists into a grimace, her eyes fixated on the ground.

As soon as she raises them to meet his, she can only shake her head and launch herself at him, holding tight onto his neck and hiding from the carriage that’s waiting behind him – with other sons and boyfriends and husbands, looking at them with the pain of someone who has gone through that dance already.

He holds tight onto her and whispers another meaningless reassurance in her ear, and she can only shake her head and swallow back a _Please, please, don’t go_ , that wouldn’t do neither of them any good.

They part with a quick kiss on the lips and a smile from him, as Emma finds it hard to stop digging her fingers in his arms and starts stepping back while holding onto him for as long as she can.

“This isn’t over,” he promises, again, and Emma feels like she might throw up. Or like she’s barely containing a whole lake of tears. Or possibly both.

He waves back at his father before quickly turning around and running to the carriage. Maybe he could barely let go of her as well.

Emma is left standing there, her eyes fixated on him as he hops on the carriage, between a scrawny kid that will probably not survive any of this and a man who looks like a father of two with a crying wife at home.

Rumple is soon standing beside her. He throws his arm around her shoulders and Emma presses her body more tightly against his, barely seeing Neal wave from the moving carriage through a veil of tears.

(There’s some consolation to be drawn from the fact that she’s not the one crying the hardest that night.)

 

 

The nausea starts soon after.

At first she thinks that it’s just his absence, the cold nights and the silent dinners and the lonely hunts in the woods, because when you live so closely together the absence is bound to be everywhere, isn’t it? There are refugees who keep coming and coming, who can blame her if it makes her sick?

She has mood swings, but so does Rumple. It’s become common for them to snap at each other and then apologize later, sit together side by side and possibly cry for a while.

Sometimes she feels dizzy and oddly tired, but she’s working for two, it’s hardly surprising. Not to mention that crying fits take a lot out of you, even more so when you can’t sleep soundly at night, too plagued by thoughts of war.

Then she starts vomiting, and at first they think she caught some disease, that it will pass, that maybe she’s just reacting oddly to their crappy situation.

Then she’s _horribly_ late and the realization hits her like a punch in the stomach.

There’s a woman in the village who has delivered a good portion of the children born there. Emma finds the courage to ask her what are the symptoms of a pregnancy, and she doesn’t like the answer.

Rumple holds her tight when she tells him, he smiles widely through the tears – and it’s a real, content smile – and promises her that he’ll help her take care of her baby until its dad comes back home – that only makes her cry harder, because _What if he doesn’t?_ , she’d want to yell.

Rumple starts working until late at night, to have more stuff to sell. Not many buy in times of war, but sometimes families passing by have managed to take money with them and they need some more layers to keep them warm, so he makes some extra money.

“You need to be well fed,” he insists, trying to make his rations smaller and smaller without her noticing – she doesn’t let him get away with it as much as he’d like her to.

 

 

When she’s already showing a _giant_ belly and her kid kicks her on regular basis – its father’s child, she can’t help thinking, can’t stay put for more than two minutes –, the war shows no sign of wanting to end.

She walks by the blacksmith and sees him building swords and other weapons for the army. She sees people selling food giving a percentage of their merch to the people who come to collect the rations for the soldiers. She sees more and more broken families passing by, some of them only with their clothes, some limping or with horrible burns on their bodies, and it makes her sick.

Emma has never believed in any gods, but right now she wishes she had someone to pray to.

 

 

The first time one of the men from their village comes back, her son is already born. She named him Henry, after the drunk owner of the bakery where she first met Baelfire – he, too, has been drafted; he had the big belly of someone who drinks too much alcohol, and she wonders if he’s still alive –, he’s eight months old and he seems to be perfectly healthy – Emma’s heart still skips a beat whenever she can’t seem to understand why he’s crying, but Rumple has done this before, and he assures her that it’s okay and that he doesn’t have some weird disease that they need to tend to.

The man who comes back, Kristoff, used to be a carpenter. His wife is the one who gave Baelfire what became her bed, in exchange for an extra pair of hands at the shop for a couple of days.

Kristoff looks much, much thinner than Emma remembered, he’s pale and seemingly frightened by any sound around him, and he’s missing a leg. The image is burnt in Emma’s skull.

 

 

The first time a list of local dead is read, Emma can barely breathe through the whole thing. Henry is still too young to understand what’s going on – thank the gods –, and Emma tries not to hold too tightly onto him, trying to concentrate on the feeling of his chin resting on her shoulder and of his weight in her arms – _No matter what, I still have him, I still have him, they can’t take him away_.

The list is thankfully short, and when Baelfire isn’t on it both Emma and Rumple draw an heavy sigh of relief, and she’s afraid that he might fall on his knees – it’s probably a bit disrespectful towards those families that take the news with tears and suffocated screams, because they weren’t as fortunate; Emma soon flees with her small family, anxious to take Henry away from all that pain.

 

 

They keep drafting younger and younger boys. The readings of local dead become more frequent, even if in such a small village there never are that many names, and more people are needed to be sent to their deaths.

The first time a fourteen-year-old kid is drafted, forcibly taken away from his crying mother’s arms, Henry is four. Emma starts fearing that this war will never end, and that someday she’ll see a man with an apologetic grimace on his face snatch her kid away from her arms at the same age she was running away from the orphanage, thinking that she at the very least deserved to be free.

 

 

“We should have run away like you wanted,” Emma says one day, when Henry is napping on his father’s bed, innocently unaware of the chaos that’s falling upon their lands. He knows that he has a mom that loves him, a grandpa that somehow manages to spoil him rotten with what little he has, and that he has a dad, somewhere, ‘on a long trip’, they told him.

He only knows Baelfire through some drawings, one that Milah made when he was a little kid, others that Neal made himself, to pass the time. Emma became his favourite subject, later on. She hates that he had no chance to draw his son – yet, she tries to remind herself, but it doesn’t feel like that war will ever end.

Rumple sighs. “It wasn’t a smart plan,” he counters, quietly, sitting on his creaking chair and staring at nothing.

When Henry is asleep, it’s like all the years that this damn war has dumped on their shoulder fall back on them.

“I’m saying you were right and you are arguing with me?” Emma scoffs, raising her eyebrows as she puts away Henry’s clean clothes. He doesn’t have many, but they made sure to make him have a couple of changes available.

“We wouldn’t have made it far,” he comments. “And Bae was never one to run away from a fight.”

“Because he’s dumb,” Emma mumbles.

“He’s also stubborn,” he counters, smiling up at her. “Takes after his mother.” A shadow falls on his face, and Emma doesn’t push. She asked about Milah, once, when she was still pregnant and there were spending a long stormy afternoon in the house, and what she got was that she died when Baelfire was little. She gets the feeling that it wasn’t an happy marriage anyway. “He’ll be back, you’ll see,” Rumple adds, smiling slightly at her.

Emma is pretty sure that she’s not the only one who needs convincing, but she decides not to kick him down.

 

 

“Mom, where is the war?” Henry asks one evening, sitting at the table with his hair still wet after taking a bath – it’s astonishing how dirty little boys can get after an afternoon spent playing outside.

Emma almost chokes on her food, her eyes widening and running to Rumple, as if for support. She only meets another pair of wide eyes.

“What— who told you about that?” she finally asks, voice barely above a whisper. Henry is five and he shouldn’t know about that shit.

Her kid shrugs. “Matty said our dads are in war,” he explains. “So where is it?”

Matthew is one of Henry’s best friends – meaning, one of the kids that he plays with the most these days; that might change pretty fast –, and Emma is friends with his mother, Lisa: she’s taking over her husband’s shop, she’s hardworking and she and Emma see eye to eye on many thinks. She likes to think that she knows her well enough to guess that Matthew didn’t get any information about the war from his mother’s mouth, not intentionally at least.

She makes a mental note to talk to Lisa about it, alert her that he might have eavesdropped.

“I, uh—” She clears her throat in a desperate attempt at buying some time, but it’s not like there’s much that she can do now but telling him the truth – or a sugarcoated version of it, at least. “The war is not a place, kid. It’s, uh, it’s when monsters attack good people and—and brave guys like your dad are sent to fight them.”

“Like in the stories?” Henry asks, leaning a bit on the table in clear excitement.

Emma somehow finds it in her to smile at him. “Yeah, more or less.”

Rumple likes to tell him stories before he goes to sleep, and Henry’s enthusiasm is unsurprising: there are always monsters to fight and heroes brave enough to stand up to them, but only the bad guys don’t make it home. Fortunately, it doesn’t even cross her kid’s mind that this ‘war’ might be any different.

“So Dad’s a hero!” Henry squeals, excitedly.

Emma isn’t sure if her smile grows fonder or more strained. “Yeah, he is.”

Rumple is staring at his food, and Emma would love nothing better than to dump this conversation on _him_. She hates that she has to discuss this, and as much as she’s grateful that Henry is blissfully immune to what she’s feeling, there’s a selfish part of her that just wants to start screaming at her kid to _stop_ daydreaming about war.

“I’m brave too!” Henry announces, and her blood runs cold.

“It’s only for grown-ups,” she replies, a little too quickly, her tone a little harsher. Henry doesn’t seem to notice.

“I’m five!” he protests.

“You need to be at least thirteen, kid,” she shoots back. And hell, that’s still way too fucking young to be fighting.

Henry can barely count to ten on a good day, so it takes him some time of staring at his fingers to realize that thirteen doesn’t figure on any of them.

“But that’s so old!” he finally yells, eyes wide in horror.

“Yep,” she says, and she can’t wait to end this damn conversation. “No monsters for you. Go back to your dinner, come on.”

Henry goes on a while talking about monsters and his favourite stories, wondering aloud if his dad would manage to defeat a dragon or two or if he’d need a magic shield like in last night’s story. Emma tries not to grimace.

(Rumple apologizes to her about the stories, later; she gives him the cold shoulder, because it’s not like she can be mad at _Henry_ , and it takes her a while to cool off and admit to him that the kid likes them, and that anything less exciting would likely bore the hell out of him. And, perhaps, it’s good that he’s looking up to his dad, even if it’s in a weird way.)

 

 

When news start spreading that the war is ending, Emma writes them off as meaningless and hopeful chatter: there were talks of a win a year back, and the year before, and yet the war is still raging, her son is well into his fifth year of life and he still never got to see his father. She’s stopped believing in rumours.

Then the rumours get more insisting, and two weeks go by without anyone being taken to the front, and a part of her starts hoping. That corner of her mind takes over when a young man comes running through the streets, showing off a paper that officially announces that the war is over, yelling at the top of his lungs that they are safe.

Emma joins the crowd that wants to check if he’s telling the truth, then she runs back home, tears streaming down her face and a huge grin threatening to split her lip.

“It’s over!” she announces, startling both Henry, who was sitting on the floor and playing, and Rumple, who was working.

The latter raises his eyes on her, frozen in shock. “It’s— what? Are you— are you serious?”

“It’s over!” she repeats, an hysterical laughter erupting from her chest. “It’s _over_. They are all coming home!”

Henry seems confused as hell when Rumple starts crying too, and Emma answers his worried ‘Mom?’ by laughing again and picking him up to kiss his cheek. “You’ll meet your dad soon!” she announces. “He’s coming home!”

 

 

It takes days. Emma can’t remember dreading so much the passage of time since the first few months after Neal left, when a part of her was still hoping that it’d be over soon and the rest of her still wasn’t used to not expecting him to be by her side.

She hears the sound of the carriage outside of the house on a quiet day, when she’s sitting on the floor with Henry, drawing with him a picture that he has decided to gift to his dad – he has done six of them already; she knows Neal will love them.

She immediately jumps on her feet, running to the window to check and letting out a faint laugh when she actually sees Baelfire jumping off, briefly waving goodbye at the men still sitting on the carriage and then turning to walk to the house.

“He’s here!” she yells at Rumple, who rushes to stand up as she bolts out of the door.

“Emma!” Neal calls, and she can see his huge grin even from there, even under all the dirt on his face. He looks thinner than when he left, but he’s whole and he’s alive and that’s all that matters.

She almost knocks him off his feet when she throws her arms around him, hiding the tears in the crook of his neck and letting out a laugh that gets mixed with a sob or two.

“Told you I’d be back,” he says, holding her tight enough to hurt – not that she minds – and sweeping her off her feet for a moment.

Emma laughs some more and cries harder, because _of course_ he comes back from years of war and the first thing he says to her is ‘I told you so’. Of course. Bastard.

Rumple joins them soon after, moving much quicker than she thought possible and basically falling against them as a result. Emma moves to her right, grabbing Rumple’s clothes to help him stay upright as Baelfire embraces him with his right arm.

“Hey, Papa,” he grins. “Missed me?”

All the tears are probably answer enough.

It takes a few moments for Emma to realize that it’s time to make some introductions.

“There’s someone you need to meet,” she announces, grabbing Neal’s arm and exchanging a look with Rumple, who smiles at her and pulls away from the embrace.

“Who?” Neal frowns, as Emma starts dragging him towards the house. She finds that Henry is standing by the door, one of his drawings in his hands and a thoughtful frown on his face.

Baelfire’s eyes widen as soon as he notices the kid on their doorstep. Emma knows, thanks to Milah’s drawing, that the resemblance between father and son is almost frightening.

“Is that—?” Neal lets out, his voice strangled. Rumple has fallen slightly behind, but he’ll probably understand Emma’s need to walk as fast as humanly possible.

“Yes,” she smiles, tears still gathering in her eyes. She promptly dries them away when they reach Henry, who seems to be studying his father.

She takes a shaky breath.

“Henry—” she announces, reaching for her son’s shoulder. “—this is your dad. Baelfire, meet Henry.”

Neal breaks into a small laugh, and if he managed not to look _that_ close to crying up until that moment, it becomes a losing battle as soon as Henry breaks into a grin and holds up his drawing – Emma manages to see that it’s the one of the river nearby, one of Henry’s favourite places to play.

“I did this for you,” the kid announces, and that’s the moment Emma knows with utmost certainty that she’s going to have to be the mean parent, because Neal looks like he might attempt to steal the moon, if Henry dared to ask.

“Thank you,” he manages to get out, accepting the drawing and looking it over – with all those tears, Emma highly doubts that he can see much – for a few seconds before looking back at Henry. “It’s beautiful. Thanks, buddy,” he repeats, hesitating for a moment before reaching over to ruffle his hair.

Henry, though, who has always been pretty affectionate even with half-strangers, takes it as an open invitation and rushes to wrap himself around his father’s legs.

“Mom says you like climbing!” he starts talking, while Neal is probably still busy trying not to faint.

“Y—yeah, uh, I do,” he manages to answer, and Emma squeezes his shoulder in support, exchanging a tearful look with Rumple, because _finally_. Finally everything is as it should be.

“We can do it together!” Henry beams.

Neal grins widely, nodding. “Sure, buddy. I’d love to.”

“But not now,” Emma intervenes, because if she knows her kid he’ll be ready to run to the woods at the first excuse. In fact, Henry starts pouting. “You can do it tomorrow, your dad is probably tired now, he needs rest.”

Baelfire, in front of his son’s pouting, seems to want to protest that he can take it, but Emma fixes him with a look that makes him shut up. He may deny it, but he looks like he needs a month of sleep. And he’ll have all the time in the world to get to know his kid now. She still can hardly believe it.

“Yeah, uh, tomorrow, buddy, okay?” Neal mercifully backs her up.

Henry keeps pouting for a few seconds, but he recovers soon, grabbing his father’s hand to pull him inside. “I have more drawings!” he announces. “And toys! I’ll show you!”

Emma lets them go, a few tears blurring her vision as for the first time in so long she looks inside her house and she can truly think, with no buts, that it’s _home_.


End file.
